Basic Books imprint: 1165 books

John Marshall

The Man Who Made the Supreme Court

by Richard Brookhiser
Language: English
Release Date: November 13, 2018

The life of John Marshall, Founding Father and America's premier chief justice In 1801, a genial and brilliant Revolutionary War veteran and politician became the fourth chief justice of the United States. He would hold the post for 34 years (still a record), expounding the Constitution he...

The Great Debate

Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

by Yuval Levin
Language: English
Release Date: December 3, 2013

An acclaimed portrait of Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the origins of modern conservatism and liberalism In The Great Debate, Yuval Levin explores the roots of the left/right political divide in America by examining the views of the men who best represented each side at its origin: Edmund...

Napoleon

A Life

by Adam Zamoyski
Language: English
Release Date: October 16, 2018

The definitive biography of Napoleon, revealing the true man behind the legend "What a novel my life has been!" Napoleon once said of himself. Born into a poor family, the callow young man was, by twenty-six, an army general. Seduced by an older woman, his marriage transformed him...

T.R.

The Last Romantic

by H. W. Brands
Language: English
Release Date: July 23, 2019

From the New York Times bestselling author, an acclaimed biography of President Teddy Roosevelt Lauded as "a rip-roaring life" (Wall Street Journal), TR is a magisterial biography of Theodore Roosevelt by bestselling author H.W. Brands. In his time, there was no more popular national...

The Word Detective

Searching for the Meaning of It All at the Oxford English Dictionary

by John Simpson
Language: English
Release Date: October 25, 2016

"A charmingly full, frank, and humorous account of a career dedicated to rigorous lexicographic rectitude. . . .[John Simpson] is an absolute hero." --Lynne Truss, New York Times Can you drink a glass of balderdash? And what do you call the part of a dog's back it can't scratch? The...

Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris

The Story of a Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year

by Peter Brooks
Language: English
Release Date: April 4, 2017

From a distinguished literary historian, a look at Gustave Flaubert and his correspondence with George Sand during France's "terrible year"--summer 1870 through spring 1871 From the summer of 1870 through the spring of 1871, France suffered a humiliating defeat in its war against...

Lost in Math

How Beauty Leads Physics Astray

by Sabine Hossenfelder
Language: English
Release Date: June 12, 2018

A contrarian argues that modern physicists' obsession with beauty has given us wonderful math but bad science Whether pondering black holes or predicting discoveries at CERN, physicists believe the best theories are beautiful, natural, and elegant, and this standard separates popular theories...

Exact Thinking in Demented Times

The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science

by Karl Sigmund, Douglas Hofstadter
Language: English
Release Date: December 5, 2017

A dazzling group biography of the early twentieth-century thinkers who transformed the way the world thought about math and science Inspired by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and Bertrand Russell and David Hilbert's pursuit of the fundamental rules of mathematics, some of the most brilliant...

Universal Man

The Lives of John Maynard Keynes

by Richard Davenport-Hines
Language: English
Release Date: May 12, 2015

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was the twentieth century's most influential economist. His ideas inspired Franklin D. Roosevelt to launch the New Deal and instructed Western nations on how to ward off revolutionary unrest, economic instability, high unemployment, and social dissolution. Keynes was...

Goddess of Anarchy

The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical

by Jacqueline Jones
Language: English
Release Date: December 5, 2017

From a prize-winning historian, a new portrait of an extraordinary activist and the turbulent age in which she lived Goddess of Anarchy recounts the formidable life of the militant writer, orator, and agitator Lucy Parsons. Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851 and raised in Texas-where...

A Just and Generous Nation

Abraham Lincoln and the Fight for American Opportunity

by Harold Holzer, Norton Garfinkle
Language: English
Release Date: November 3, 2015

In A Just and Generous Nation, the eminent historian Harold Holzer and the noted economist Norton Garfinkle present a groundbreaking new account of the beliefs that inspired our sixteenth president to go to war when the Southern states seceded from the Union. Rather than a commitment to eradicating...

The Impossible Presidency

The Rise and Fall of America's Highest Office

by Jeremi Suri
Language: English
Release Date: September 12, 2017

A bold new history of the American presidency, arguing that the successful presidents of the past created unrealistic expectations for every president since JFK, with enormously problematic implications for American politics In The Impossible Presidency, celebrated historian Jeremi Suri charts...

What Is Real?

The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

by Adam Becker
Language: English
Release Date: March 20, 2018

The untold story of the heretical thinkers who dared to question the nature of our quantum universe Every physicist agrees quantum mechanics is among humanity's finest scientific achievements. But ask what it means, and the result will be a brawl. For a century, most physicists have followed...

Neanderthal Man

In Search of Lost Genomes

by Svante Pääbo
Language: English
Release Date: February 11, 2014

A preeminent geneticist hunts the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes to answer the biggest question of them all: how did our ancestors become human? Neanderthal Man tells the riveting personal and scientific story of the quest to use ancient DNA to unlock the secrets of human evolution. Beginning...
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